module Syntaxfree where

12Dec06

I’ve been writing about Haskell for a while on my main blog. It feels out of place there, though, partly because my main audience expects me to be an economist (I am an economist, as a matter of fact) and read about economics and partly because it ends up being written in portuguese, which alienates in from the vast majority of people actually interested in Haskell.

I am, therefore, starting a new blog to be focused entirely on Haskell matters. This isn’t quite the super-coolmath-y, research-y weblog. It’s not a “beginner’s route through Haskell” either, though. I’m not exactly a complete beginner — I understand (some of) Squiggol, (some of) monads and suchlike — but haven’t done any significant work in Haskell yet. Moreover, not having a traditional CS or programming education, I’m constantly hitting walls on places where people with CS experience wouldn’t and conversely finding quite natural the very concepts that people with imperative programming experience find bedazzling.

I’m also hoping that having a formal, public record of my Haskell work will force myself into being more organized and carrying through the end of more projects — as well as forcing me to be more “documentative”, given my aspie-ish tendency to leave things as inscrutable pieces of history that I myself can’t unravel after a few months.

Ideally, this blog should both be informative and helpful for those less knowledgeable than me and illustrative to those in deeper waters; my experience with the IRC channel shows that the wizards are quite interested in the perspective of newcomers, and I’m both a newcomer with an unusual experience (Scheme was the first language I felt powerful with, and Haskell is practically the first language I’ve studied for real) and someone with an unusual (for the Haskell community) academic background bringing over the needs of an entirely different scientific community. (I do hope I can refrain from econopunditting here, though ;)).

I’d ask that grammar slips and bad english style are not only forgiven, but pointed out and corrected. English is not my first language, and while I’m very comfortable reading and participating in online chatrooms with it, I haven’t written large chunks of argumentative text in a while — and a lot could be corrected in my portuguese writing style as well!

I hope this is a worthwhile trip for myself and readers alike. For the time being, up and out!

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I’ve subscribed to your blog and look forward to your writings. I’m learning Haskell myself (though I do work in the computer field), so any and all info I can find is appreciated.

I don’t know if you want to ask for grammer and spelling corrections – be careful what you wish for!

That said, I noticed one oddity in your post. In the sentence “… finding quite natural the very concepts that people with imperative programming experience find bedazzling”, “bedazzling” is probably not the word you want. Maybe “bedeviling”? The context implies people are confused by the concepts you find natural, but “bedazzle” kind of says they are amazed and entranced by them. But hey, maybe thats what you meant!

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Dr. Syntaxfree

Dr. Syntaxfree has no PhD and shouldn't call himself a "doctor", but does so for amusement value anyway. An unemployed (ok, graduate student) econopundit by day, he's been progressively obsessed about Haskell to the point he often can't fathom not working on it. A jack-of-many-trades, he has an unusual CS background in that he knows no imperative programming at all, he hopes to be both helpful to those less knowledgeable than him and illustrative to the really smart people trying to understand the mentality of a common man trying to tackle functional programming.

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